It is clearly no accident that the title of this interdisciplinary
project — which confronts the possibilities of artistically and culturally representing
the complex set of issues surrounding gender/domestic violence — is Cárcel de amor
(“Prison of Love”). Borrowed from an epistolary love-novel with an unhappy ending
by Diego de San Pedro
(Seville, 1492), [i]
in the 21st century its medieval outlook and beliefs may well, both metaphorically
and in effect symbolize the fear of the repressive patriarchal system. As an artistic
space marked by its interdisciplinarity, Cárcel de amor risks
being viewed as insufficiently rigorous in addressing such a tough subject. Far
from assuming that 'anything goes', this project has developed over a period of
almost two years grounded on the idea that artistic and cultural codes are collective
representations, and that their form and content are shaped by –and help shape–
the social order.
As in other sentimental romances, medieval or otherwise, in Cárcel de amor physical
love is connected with violence. With over 30 editions in Spanish and translated
into several European languages, this medieval bestseller stresses the “rule of
the father” — the literal meaning of patriarchy. Ignoring the pleas of both his
family and court entourage, the King locks up his daughter Laureola
and is “willing to enforce the cruelest sentence for her as her actions were cause
for dishonor” (Deyermond).[ii] In the context of contemporary feminism,
patriarchy is no longer restricted to the father/daughter relationship: the first
wave of feminism (Kate Millet, Sexual Politics,
l969) described it more broadly as “male domination” — or any instance of male
control over a woman. Theorists of the third wave of feminism expanded on Millet’s
definition still further, criticizing its “reductionism” and stressing that the
same kind of framework might be applied to all gender relations, including homosexual
relationships.[iii]
***
The home: beyond social science, and since literature and visual art
share certain features, the medium of writing has offered, since its existence,
realistic depictions
of the death of a relationship. This is how Maya Angelou explains it:
With all heart-sore lovers I say, "I don't know what went wrong."
But I suspect it was the house. The living room was two stories high, and I put
my large three- by five-foot paintings on the walls, and upon those vast reaches
they diminished and began to look little better than enlarged colour
posters. I laid my Indian and Pakistani rugs on the floor over the beige wall-to-wall
carpeting and they drowned in the vastness of the living room, appearing little
more than colorful table mats on a large boardroom table.
Everything was built in--standard oven, microwave oven, grill, garbage
disposal, compactor. There was nothing for my husband to do. …
Before, when our marriage had shown weakness — as all marriages do,
I suppose — I would argue with my husband on his procrastination in taking out
the garbage or his failure to separate the cans from the glass bottles, or his
refusal to brush the Weber clean and empty the ashes. But, alas, since the
house did everything itself, I couldn't blame him for his inconsequential failures,
and was forced to face up to our real problems.
Maya Angelou.
Even the Stars Look Lonesome.
While selecting and shaping this book, this Angelou excerpt blaming her “dream
house” for her emotional distress and marital inequality was one of the many texts
we considered. In the end, we did not choose to include it. It provided me, however,
while writing this text, with a link to recent studies on women's experiences
of modernity — more often than not a masculine concept tied to notions of modernization,
technology, and industrialization. In advanced societies, where the Industrial
Revolution arrived in the early hours of the 20th century, by the outbreak of
Word War II magazines and newspapers were already promoting modern lifestyles
en masse, claiming that scientific and technological advances would make the situation
of women healthy, happier, and more fulfilling. Modernity presented women with
the possibility of a life outside the home, the attainment of a more autonomous
self. Yet the story is not that simple, for as Rita Felski
argues, “the vocabulary of modernity is a vocabulary of anti-home. [iv] On the
other hand, contradictions and conflicts between professional achievement and
domesticity are not solved just by “leav[ing] their home selves behind (Johnson
and Lloyd, 15).[v]
By the mid-40s, men were returning from the war and needed jobs, and
women, who had struggled through wartime to keep the family economy alive by entering
the workforce, were sent back home. This time round, they were rewarded with an
identity, a kind of political identity: that of the housewife.
This identity, glamorized by the press, cinema and radio, evolved into
their social identity. Apparently freed from the burden of household tasks as
modern appliances, planned spaces, gardens and other material comforts could theoretically
free them from household chores, the image of the new postwar housewife was a
“manager of domesticity”, a citizen with a social role whose tasks ranged
from informed shopping to engaging in social activities. Yet this identity,
as María Ruido’s work La voz humana explores, became one in which they would be spoken for rather than
empowered to establish their own voice, to take action on their own behalf. Ruido’s
video goes back to the roots of the feminist art of the 70s, when she was a child.
Integrating the performative
dimensions of that discourse, this work affirms that women’s voices are not always
their voice. The postwar political rhetoric reworked the image of the home as
a place where women would be valued but silent. It was a place of traditional
values that ensured women a safe, secure, bounded existence, waiting for their
husbands to come home from work each day. Conversely, for men, homeownership
meant independence and the manly virtues of self-reliance; owning their own home
guaranteed their manhood, both in terms of a sense of individual agency and of
citizenship (Brett 1992: 73).
Inside this safe and sound place, women were trapped between tradition
and modernity. The domestic/private sphere has been rendered as a space of emotions
and subjugation, an intimate space where they were at the mercy of fathers, brothers
and especially husbands — men who they often married to escape their childhood
inferno, yet returning to same point of departure, indicating the inadequacy of
a mapping a linear route.
Just because a woman runs away from an abusive father or brother and
moves to another private space does not mean that the situation will change. It
is inside this private space where the law of patriarchy still governs in its
most primitive form. The private space, the home, and all those social arrangements
based on a false notion about romantic love have represented a recurring demonstration
of patriarchy’s repressive regime.[vii]
***
Cárcel de amor: from
the l970s, when gender and violence first appeared in feminist texts, until the
present, when the issue is on the lips of lawmakers, politicians, social workers
and psychiatrists, there have been many studies analyzing the situations of individuals
or well-defined groups such as drug and alcohol addicts. Little light has been
shed, however, on why some men — even those with irreproachable social behavior
— become killers at home. Psychiatrists, for instance, suggest that they abuse
because they are unable to express their feelings. Such men are pictured as weak,
insecure, inadequate, or dependent. They suffer from poor impulse control, poorly
developed egos and/or deprived childhoods.
On the other hand, sociological research on the nature of abusive relationships
points to a combination of factors. In “A Sociological Perspective on the Prevention
and Treatment of Wife-Beating," Murray Straus argues that
relatively few wife-beating cases are caused by purely psychological factors,
or occur solely as a result of the organization of society (unemployment, couples
living apart from friends or family). Rather, he suggests that it is a combination
of these factors that produces most domestic abuse.[vi] Yet, because physical
violence is not the only way to dominate a partner, activists and researchers
have emphasized the importance of expanding the definition of domestic violence
to include other non-violent behaviors such as emotional abuse or economic control.
Envisioned as a system of control, domestic violence is also tied to other forms
of gender oppression such as rape, sexual harassment, or economic disenfranchisement, in short, a broader system of inequalities that subordinate
— in the vast majority of cases — women.
In the last couple of years, Spain has been forced to confront its
shocking failures with regard to gender oppression in the home. [viii] At the
time this text went to print, 10 women had been killed in first 45 days of the
year 2005, while between 2002 and 2004, 169 individuals of all ages and social
classes lost their lives at the hands of a person they thought to be a loved one,
even if a daydream was experienced as love. And in 2003 alone, 7530 applied for
protection, according to data from the Spanish Women's Institute, the Instituto de la Mujer. [ix] Those numbers, and no wonder,
could not be ignored and it became vital both to locate women within a socio-economic
and cultural context and to devise a broad range of initiatives ranging from work
benefits to prevention and safety measures, culminating in the recent approval
of a law against gender-based violence, the Ley Integral Contra la Violencia de Género.
In this publication, Cristina Vega reviews the history of the feminist movement in
Spain and analyzes how the issue of domestic violence became a "public matter"
after decades of silence. Essential to understanding this transformation in society,
her text is the product of countless interviews with lawyers, social workers and
educators who question the parameters of these changes as well as their urgency
Presenting multiple views on violence between couples — or within families
— in all its five interconnected parts
Cárcel de amor
tackles the subject from different angles and reflects on the immense power of
a range of harmful behaviors, both physical and emotional, directed against the
Other. Born of the desire to take the debate on the subject beyond the official
arena, the project connects a broader range of data about gender oppression through
cultural production. Its contours and energies express the multifaceted and shifting
relations between cultural analysis, political critique and artistic
production.
Consisting of a film and video program, a web-based project, a performance
by Angélica Liddell,
conferences and panel discussions — made
possible by a generous grant from the Instituto de la Mujer — as well as this publication,
Cárcel de amor
also recognizes the continuous challenges posed by new technologies which, like
cultures, are constantly evolving into new forms, thus forcing us to enter the
site of conflict even when we are not directly involved in the conflict itself.
It was set in motion with a selection of films and videos made by co-curator
Virginia Villaplana and myself, bearing in mind the following framework: as an artistic/cultural
project its foundation should be reality, but rather than just reproduce it, like
news images do, reworking this reality in revised forms was more important. Rather
than assuming that it is the real that must be captured or reproduced, the narratives
and images we selected do not depict events as we see them in the news; they are
interested in the cinematic relation of text/images to produce meaning.[x] Regarding the selection, Villaplana, who is also a filmmaker, says: "it brings the promise to begin
a story with many sequences which, although filmed, have remained absent.”
We also agreed that when working with media art, it is clear that the
image-text relationship is not merely a technical question but “a site of conflict,
a nexus where political, institutional, and social antagonisms play themselves
out in the materiality of representation.”(Mitchell, 91) [xi] The media works
included here share this kind of imagination, as they do not rely on a mere display
of style or manipulated imagery. Some works have pictures but not words; others
have words and no image, while in others words are not related to the pictures.
As combined action, image and text they depict events with “realism” or “the capacity
of pictures to show the truth about things.” (Mitchell, 324)
Featured here with intensity and depth, Mitchell’s realism maps these
contemporary representations and discourses on gender inequality and oppression.
They avoid generalizing human behavior (a strategy too frequently used by the
media) and are conceptually constructed using intricate metaphors and complex
aesthetic structures, breaking down the barriers between public and private images.
Although this publication includes synopses of all works, I will mention a few
of them which are not documentaries – Villaplana discusses those in her essay — where this “realism” is a given.
Cecilia Barriga’s
El origen de la violencia is a one-minute video
which, as in advertising, instantaneously links the message with its recipient.
An apparently inoffensive game between a young kid and his kitten (and not any
heroic episode,) is enough, as it shows the loss with no return of childhood innocence
through violence. Almost soundless — we hear only the muffled noise of breaking
thorns — Beth Moysés’ Deshaciendo nudos focuses
on the thoughts of battered and poor women. While tearing apart the thorns they
should be thinking about their lives, as the artist asked them to do. The eight-minute
video seems much longer, for it forces you to think about your own life as well.
Teresa Serrano’s A Room of her Own is a seven-minute
film about the fears and insecurities of a young woman who imagines remaking a
film noir — a
genre that has its origins in an expression of male insecurity in the face of
social change. What else can be considered
a crime of domestic violence? Sheila M. Sofian offers Survivors, an
animated film with dark images and voiceover interviews with battered
women and a counselor who helps recovering male abusers. The existential questioning
of Survivors produces a revelatory state of mind that cannot easily be
interpreted by the viewer. Produced for Cárcel
de amor by
Terry Berkowitz
and Blerti Murataj,
Eye of the Needle uses the erosion of public and private space — a voice
in a courtroom vs. an illusionary
house — to explore one of the arguments of this essay: the home as battleground.
Finally, Syntagma,
by Valie Export,
is a work rich in images that suggest a divided corporality, but one which resists
any attempt to interpret this duality of the body through the usual antagonism
of reality/representation. For the pioneer Export there is no bodily reality that
is not under the influence of representation and vice versa.
Still known as "non-fiction", to distinguish it from fictional
cinema, nowadays we are unsure of the nature and boundaries of a documentary,
manifest in a staccato of irregular shapes like the architecture of a contemporary
metropolis. To name a few: from award-winning filmmaker Lourdes Portillo we have Señorita extraviada, which tells the story
of the over 300 women who have disappeared from the streets of Ciudad Juárez in Mexico,
many of them later found raped and murdered, their bodies dumped in ditches or
the desert. Warrior Marks, by another award-winning director, Pratibha
Parmar, unlocks
some of the cultural and political complexities surrounding the issue of female
genital mutilation and includes interviews with women from Senegal, Burkina Faso
and other African countries. Domestic Violence is one of Frederick Wiseman’s
most important films and “like any good Wiseman film,“ as Kent Jones wrote
in the magazine Film Comment, it is “dense with unforgettable images, passages
and vignettes…”
From the initial idea of a program exclusively made up of film and
video, Cárcel
de amor
grew to incorporate a web-based project conceived and created
by Remedios Zafra, with its
own subheading Violencia Sin Cuerpos, or "Violence
Without Bodies." She has selected works by international
artists and created a website
where not only the images but also the text and links with other
institutions tackle perceptions and expose the role violent
behavior plays in contemporary constructions of masculinities.
In this catalogue, we have included Zafra's text and a complete description
of works included in her project. Today it makes sense to think about new media
as a useful theoretical category. We cannot ignore that there is another part
of culture which relies on computer technology for distribution, and we have reason
to suspect that eventually most forms of culture will be distributed via computer.
Finally, this publication is a project by itself. For several months,
its co-curator
Villaplana and myself, with the inspired and always welcome suggestions and contributions
by Emilia Garcia-Romeo,
Cristina Camara, Remedios Zafra and Eva Navarro, scoured
books and Internet sites and engaged in personal conversations with people from
different fields, seeking to create not a mere exhibition catalogue, but a book
with many stories, since there is no single story of domestic violence.
Like the film and video program and the Internet project, this book
reflects multifaceted point of views. Most of them were translated for the first
time into Spanish or written expressly for this publication. From philosophy to
poetry, we hope these pieces contribute ideas to the topic beyond the limits of
official rhetoric. Structurally similar to a web site, this book is organized
by links connecting related texts, avoiding a monolithic and uniform discourse.
Throughout its 350 pages, interrelated cross-references flow from love to trauma
through the words of Bell Hooks, who proposes a new definition of love in which
abuse is not permitted, while Judith Herman observes that a traumatic event disorganizes
the human system by destroying the belief that one can be oneself in relation
to others (Herman l992, 53).[xii]
The Slovene philosopher and sociologist Renata Saleci, in The Silence of Feminine
Jouissance,
examines love as the mediating entity in the essential antagonism between the
sexes, and the gaze and the voice as love's medium, employing the tale of the
sirens with a Lacanian
twist. Egyptian feminist Nawal
El Saadawi’s
La Fotografia
recounts a full sensory replay of traumatic events in a flashback of disconnected
fragments.
The intermingling of mind and body, the inability to express suffering,
or what cannot be represented, and how language is related to the mechanisms of
power, are also part of this publication. As Primo Levi writes of
his time spent in a concentration camp: “our language lacks words to express this
offence, the
demolition of a man.” Tori
Moi, in El
sexismo en el
lenguaje, asks
whether “language is sexist per se”: after analyzing the Spanish Dictionary,
lexicographer Eulalia
Ledlo's answer
is a categorical yes. The representation of domestic violence in the mass media
is another subject addressed in the book, and Jenny Kitzinger's article
Media Coverage of Sexual Violence is a reflection on how feminist analyses have helped transform discourse and representation, language
and identity, by contrasting it with media reporting. The journalist Charo Nogueira looks
at the ways in which the mainstream Spanish media continues to commodify and sexualize
women. Art Historian Ana Navarrete explores the argument of
representation of gender and violence in art in Performance feminista sobre la violencia de género. Este funeral es por muchas muertas. Juan Vicente
Aliaga writes
about the relations of domination between the metropolis and former colonies,
although we are supposedly living in a post-colonial age, and reviews a series
of works — some made by Western artists, others not — that allude to violence.
We are confident that there is a vision in this collection of writings
and artworks from 30 international artists, many of them expressly created for
this publication. We attempted to answer at least some of the questions about
where women are today in terms of their relationship to society, culture and with
themselves. Yet our aim is not to present an authoritative summary. In fact, for
an editor (or editors, since this volume is the product of team commitment and
enthusiasm), such a project may be a source of disappointment, or even frustration,
for it is impossible to assemble a narrative that clarifies every aspect of the
question: “How did domestic violence begin?" Or why do men (or a partner)
may hit their wives (or companions) at a given moment?
But I'm getting ahead of myself: the meaning of Cárcel de Amor: Relatos culturales sobre la violencia de género is enhanced
by the participation of five institutions around Spain, showing an institutional
commitment to artistic projects that address social/political issues. Following
its presentation at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS),
the film and video section will travel to Hospital de San Juan de Dios. Espacio
de Arte Contemporáneo in Almagro, Centro Párraga in Murcia, Artium in Álava,
CAB in Burgos, Centre d´Art
La Panera in Lleida,
and Filmoteca
Canaria
del Gobierno de Canarias
in Tenerife and
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
In different regions, each host center will organize
lectures and panel discussions on the subject, intensifying the level of debate
stimulated by the exhibition images which, as Villaplana likes to say, are “counterimages, versus the anonymous faces of media information made up of cold, anonymous numbers.”
It is impossible to conclude this already long essay without expressing
all my appreciation to the young professional women who work at Audiovisual Department
here at MNCARS. To the “super” Cristina Cámara who has shouldered so many
responsibilities, from curatorial
to editorial, always perfect. To Noemí Espinosa who, with persistence and without losing her
temper, over several months kept in touch with artists and distributors in many
countries while always ready for anything we asked of her. To Eva Ordoñez, who in
addition to all the administrative matters, from handling invoices to booking
hotels, was so excited about the project that she was always willing to do anything
we might need. To lively Eva Navarro, a department intern, who
I would like to hire. The breadth of this project also required outside assistance
and dedication. Emilia García-Romeu, the editorial coordinator who went far
beyond her “job description” to infuse the project with intelligence and insightfulness.
To Amparo Lozano for her
dedication in revising, together with Camara, all the texts with clear ideas
on how to improve them. To Carmen Lascasas for keeping things moving
in the corridors of this institution. To Florencia Grassi, our favorite designer, for whom every catalogue is a challenge —
one that she always tackles with an open heart. To Ernesto Ortega Blázquez who, with García-Romeu and
Antonio García,
translated all the texts with professionalism and good writing, without missing
a deadline.
Needless to say, this project would not be possible without the support
of the artists, their galleries or distributors, the writers, and the backing
of this institution.
****
Throughout the book we try to make the argument that if politics is
to be fair, we must fashion a culture in which everyone understands who suffers
and why. Do you currently live in such a culture? Three months before Cárcel de amor’s opening
at MNCARS, the Ley
Integral de Violencia
de Género was
passed by the Spanish Congress. We have yet to see what its real effects will
be. By now, as women we can say that our existence is in danger. It also remains
to be seen whether women who have experienced violence at the hands of men — or
a partner — and must turn to the criminal justice system to try to get their abuser
convicted, will succeed in doing so. This project is dedicated to all of them.
Berta Sichel
is the Director of the Audiovisual Arts Department at MNCARS
[1] The book was translated into Catalan, Italian (nine editions),
French, and German. A bilingual Spanish-French edition published in Paris in l555
was reprinted 14 times, giving it bestseller status.
[2] Diego de San Pedro. Cárcel de Amor. Edited by Carmen Parrilla with a preliminary study by Alan Deyermond. Madrid:
Cátedra, 1995, XLII-LV.
[3]
While selecting the film and video pieces we attempted to find at least one that
addresses the subject, even contacting international gay and lesbian video festivals
and other associations, but it was not possible to locate any works on the subject.
[4] Rita Felski.
Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture.
New York: New York University Press, 2000, 86.
[5]
Lesley Johnson and Justine Lloyd. Sentence to Everyday Life: Feminism and the
Housewife. Berg: London, New York, 2004, 47-87.
[6]
The traditional and popular interpretation of domestic violence attributed (and
still attributes) the problem either to poor anger management
skills or individual pathology (Avis,
1992; Davis, 1987; Fagan,
1988; Morgan, 1981). However, research on the nature of abusive relationships
revealed that, while the above factors may sometimes play a role in domestic violence,
the abuse is most often not so much about expressing anger as it is about exercising
control (Dobash & Dobash,
1979; Fine, 1989; Hegde, 1996;
Schechter, 1982). See Naming
Knowledge: A Language for Reconstructing Domestic Violence and Systemic Gender
Inequity. Contributors: Catherine Ashcraft
- author. Journal Title: Women and Language. Volume: 23. Issue: 1. 2000.
Page Number: 3. George Mason University.
[7]
Jane Pilcher and Imelda Whelehan. 50 Key Concepts in Gender Studies (Sage
Publication: London, 2004), 44
[8]
As in Foucault's essay “The Subject of Power”, the word
powerlessness has power in itself since to understand power we must ask the question
“how” and not “what”. In this
context, power is not something one “has” but a link
between one who enjoys and the other who suffers.
[9]
www.MTAS.es/Mujer
[10]
See Ron Burnett. How Images
Think. (MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass, 2004).
[11] WJT Mitchel.
Picture Theory. The University of Chicago Press (Chicago, London: l994).
[12] Judith
Lewis Herman. Trauma and Recovery. (New York: Basic Books, l992).